Pages

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Get Out of There!

I was talking with Kristin briefly over instant messenger today about a situation that involves one of our friend's friends. The situation goes something like this: Some friends are hanging out, getting high and drunk. In the room, on a table in plain sight, is a handgun. A guy, we'll call Bob, shows up and proceeds to get drunk and high as well. In their collective inebriated stupor, one of the people there starts fiddling with the handgun and shoots Bob in the face, killing him.

That's the story that was told to me. It may not be a 100% accurate, but it is a decent enough story to start me thinking. Kristin said she felt bad for Bob since his life was so tragically taken from him. I disagreed with her, at least to a point. It might be because I'm simply callous or maybe I'm just a jerk, but I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for our pal, Bob.

The first thing I thought when I heard this story was, "Why did Bob stay? Why didn't he get the heck out of there?" If I showed up at a friend's place, saw that they were high and drunk, and noticed a handgun just sitting on a table in the middle of the room I'd think it was time to leave. You see, for me alcohol + marijuana + guns isn't equal to a fun time. I would see that as a recipe for something terrible to happen, which it did.

So should we feel sorry for the guy? I'm still divided. On one hand it's too bad that he got killed, but on the other hand he knew the people were inebriated and saw the gun. The only reasons I could see for him staying would be sheer stupidity or the people there must have been some damn good friends. So do either of them make a case for having sympathy for the guy?

Well, if he stayed because he thought of the people there as his really good friends, I would question the type of people you were hanging out with. If your group of friends routinely hung out with guns around, I'd be a little sketch. If they did that AND got wasted, I'd really take a strong look at the character of your friends. There should be alarms going off in any normal person's head that your friends are a little odd if they just sit around, drink some beers, smoke some weed, and leave guns on the table. I don't think it matters how close of friends they are, any drunk/high person combined with a gun is a bad situation waiting to happen.

So is stupidity then an excuse? Absolutely not. I don't think that stupidity should ever be an excuse for anything. End of story.

Huh...... I took a break while writing this and I now forget where I was trying to take this. I'm sure I'll remember after I post this, but one thing is clear in my mind--it's too bad Bob was killed, but willingly put himself into a very high risk situation so I have very little sympathy for him.